Believe it or not, some organizations don’t have a learning management system (LMS). This makes life more difficult for many, but surprisingly, large organizations with 10,000+ employees can get away without one.
How do we know there are organizations without an LMS?
Because we’ve worked with them. Even organizations with over 10,000 employees sometimes don’t have an LMS. We worked with an unnamed organization with more than 10,000 workers without an LMS. They even figured out how to do required compliance training every year and track it. It’s inefficient, isn’t the best solution for compliance training (but what is?), nor should it be done. But it can be done!
A learning management system (LMS) has never been needed less (see below).
This article doesn’t cover the specific details of tracking compliance training without an LMS, but it will give you some ideas about how to forgo an LMS if you’re set on it. No matter what type of training you want to make available to employees, there’s a way to do it without an official LMS.
Making self-paced eLearning courses (what this post focuses on), performance support, training videos, and more available to employees without an LMS is possible. Depending on your organization and the requirements for training, an LMS has never been less required!
Okay, maybe that’s an overstatement. Most organizations do need, should have, will benefit from, and will continue to need an LMS long into the future. However, there are many alternatives to the old LMS. Some applications have built-in contextual help, allowing employees to get the help they need without a course or anything.
Then, there are tools like 7taps, which have a very simplistic LMS built in for microlearning.
An LMS is packed full of benefits to your organization and has never been needed more (yes, we see the irony).
Videos can go anywhere. While it’s best to have a video hosting platform, even with that, you can still embed a video on any page on the internet—no LMS needed!
We said you could do it, but you just want to get straight to it, right?
Okay, okay, here are some options for where you can put training content without an LMS.
It’s a good idea to keep reading because while you can put training content almost anywhere, there are some significant drawbacks to doing it outside an LMS.
Non-LMS Options for Where to Put Training Content
For a little context about the options we’re providing, our focus is on self-paced courses. That’s because those are usually the training type put into an LMS. It’s not typically necessary or expected to place performance support or any other kind of training into an LMS.
Even instructor-led training isn’t put into an LMS. The LMS might handle signups and tracking, but the actual session isn’t hosted through the LMS.
And for live training, good luck getting that into the LMS!
How are you supposed to get those people into that tiny little box!?
Yay for hacking your employee’s workflow and getting them what you need without an LMS!
As a cautionary note, we do not recommend you pursue these routes as a replacement for an LMS. It will remain true for a long time that an LMS is more helpful and better at hosting training content than any other method, including those listed here.
So onward with ways you can host digital training content without an LMS.
Intranet
You may have to pair this with another option, but your company intranet is a great place to embed or provide a link to your course. If you store the exported course content on cloud storage, you can link to it in your company intranet or embed it right on a page.
This is how eLearning was done at the company we mentioned in the intro. They ran a file server that hosted files internally (so it doesn’t even need to be cloud storage) that they linked to from their SharePoint intranet.
You can surface training content easily on an intranet, but likely can’t store it there.
Every rapid eLearning development tool exports a main HTML page in the root of the exported files. It could be an index.html file or anything ending in dot HTML (.html). You have to export your eLearning project to an LMS (even though you’re not using an LMS), and you’ll get all the files you need to run the course.
You can see examples of that on our portfolio page, where we have courses embedded right on our website. Just upload that folder structure to your available server and then link to the HTML page.
Presto, you can now access course content from SharePoint or whatever other intranet software you use.
It’s not an ideal solution, but it’s a solution, nonetheless. Your company intranet can be a decent front-end for accessing a course. That means if a department in your organization has a course they need people to take, it can be available on their department page on the intranet.
Cloud Storage
Just like if you have an in-house file server you can upload course files, the same goes for cloud storage. You have a file server that can serve up content no matter where employees are in the world, and it’s quick, too.
There are plenty of cloud storage providers that you could use for course content. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure Cloud, or Google Cloud are good options. They can provide you with as much or as little cloud storage as your organization needs and are extremely affordable. They’ll serve up content that can be linked to in emails, messages, or shared however.
Cloud storage is an easy, vast, and cheap solution for storing course content.
You can even link to a course from the company intranet while the course files are in the cloud. But then again, if you’re using Microsoft 365, your SharePoint is already in the cloud, and you can explore options there.
This one segues nicely into your company website because it’s likely hosted on cloud storage. Our website is hosted on cloud storage and your organization’s likely is too.
Company Website
When you export an eLearning course from major rapid development tools, they’re mini websites. So, why couldn’t you use a folder on your company website to host your eLearning content?
There’s no reason you couldn’t if that’s the route you must take. I’m sure it would require some approvals, security ironed out, and other internal steps, but it’s already set up for hosting content. Remember that anything hosted on your public website is also public unless it’s secured to be accessed only on your organization’s network.
If secured, course content could be stored on your company website server.
This way, you could post a link to the eLearning content in your company website’s folder. It’s not ideal and shouldn’t be taken lightly as an LMS alternative, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
Anywhere you can upload files and a web browser can access the HTML files, you can make a course available without an LMS. That excludes SharePoint unless you found a hack for that since SharePoint wants to open an HTML page in its editor rather than opening the page.
While we don’t condone using any of these methods, they can work in a pinch. Sometimes, getting training content to employees is more important than the how. And if you don’t have an LMS up and running, these solutions can help you in a bind.
What You Lose with These Options
We’ve mentioned a few things you lose when you don’t have a real learning management system. There’s a reason why LMSs are so popular. They offer many essential features that can help an organization work more efficiently.
There’s nothing like an organization that cares enough about its employees to invest in an LMS. That’s why we recommend you get an LMS as soon as possible. Just like training shows you care about employees, an LMS also shows you care about them and that you value their future and want to invest in them.
So, let’s look at some of what you lose when you don’t put training content into an LMS.
Tracking And Reporting
As we mentioned, there are some ways to get around this without an LMS; it’s just not easy and won’t be as thorough. Every good LMS makes it easy to track whether someone has completed content. They also make it easy to report who has done what and who still needs to do what.
That’s great for compliance training!
I know, nobody likes compliance training, but sometimes it’s necessary. An LMS makes tracking and reporting extremely easy. Having an LMS also makes it nice and easy to require a course before gaining access to company software.
You might be leaving a lot of data on the table without the tracking and reporting of an LMS.
We built a course that saves an organization money every year, and the LMS is essential in making it all work. To gain access to the system, employees must first take the course. The LMS makes it easy to track if that employee has taken the course and can be granted access to the system.
The tracking and reporting also make it easy to monitor performance, generate reports for completion, and get other metrics to help make decisions. The correct data can make it easy to make big decisions, and an LMS helps collect that data.
Central Administration
There’s nothing more convenient than having all course content managed from one place. Employees who manage loading courses into the system and assigning them can do it all in one place. Not only that, but all metrics are available in one place.
If you try to track course completion without an LMS, you may have to compile several lists to track who has done what and who still needs to do it. It’s not an easy process. An LMS makes it easy by centrally locating all important training metrics.
It’s also easier to synchronize computer accounts with the LMS, so user management is completely automated. More systems can be automated with an LMS that you can’t do with course content scattered all over with no accountability of who has taken it.
Central Access
Central access is along the same lines as central administration. It’s nice for employees to have one place to take training and register for classes for all company training. They don’t have to go to the department website, find an email, or jump through any hoops.
When your organization has an LMS, it’s as simple as the employee going to it, searching for what they want, registering, and taking the training. That means employees can also quickly discover new training that could be relevant to them or help them work better.
An LMS is a great way to centralize all training and help make employees better at their jobs. How’s that for investing in your employees?
Content Security
This is a big one! Your organization’s training is intellectual property and likely proprietary at that. If you use some janky ways of getting courses to employees without an LMS, you’re not always doing it securely.
If you use a public folder on your web server or even cloud storage, it isn’t easy to make that content private. That means anyone on the internet could access it, no matter how hard you try to secure it.
An LMS is inherently only accessible to your employees. That means your proprietary information remains within your organization, and no intellectual property gets stolen.
Without an LMS, your organization risks having proprietary information stolen.
In addition to security from the outside world, an LMS allows administrators to show a course only to certain employees. And get this, they can do it all from one central location!
There’s typically even the capability of making one course required to gain access to another course. So, you can have a whole curriculum that has to be completed in a specific order. That simply can’t be done if a course is just out there in the ether, available in any order and at any time with no organization or accountability.
Scalability
While this one won’t always be an issue, it could be if you host course files on a company server. If you’re using cloud storage, this won’t likely be an issue because cloud storage can scale up or down nearly infinitely. Think of all the videos people are watching on YouTube right now. That’s massive scaling.
An LMS is designed to scale with your content and employees, though. It’s designed to host course content and manage the load of people accessing content. Remember that it’s not intended to be a video host. Hosting training videos (even if embedded in a course) on a dedicated video hosting platform is always best.
Other than that, you can load your LMS up with useful courses that help employees grow in their jobs. Big emphasis on courses that are useful to employees.
Wrap Up
While you now have some ideas of where to put digital training (mainly eLearning) without an LMS, we hope you don’t. Having an LMS is always ideal; nothing can compare to it. Even though it’s the best solution and we recommend it, sometimes it’s unrealistic, and you still need a course available to employees.
Just be sure no matter what option you choose, you’re not making protected company information public on the internet. Or, worse yet, making private employee or patient information available online.
There’s still no replacement for an LMS and it’s overall the best solution for making training content available to employees.
It’s always possible to do without an LMS, but it’s not a good investment in your organization or employees. The better investment (of which the return is phenomenal) is to have an LMS that fits your needs. You’ll gain a lot of essential functionality to help your organization succeed.
A good LMS is a great way to deliver training content to employees and make it easier on them, all while giving more data to your organization that can ultimately lead to better decisions.
While we can’t help you choose the right LMS (not our specialty), we can help you build effective custom software training solutions. That’s just as important because it helps your employees work through an ever-changing environment from all the technical innovations to grow your organization.
If you want to talk digital training, schedule a free consultation so we can learn more about your project and goals. If you want to talk about getting an LMS, while we’re not the experts, we know people, so feel free to reach out.